Funferal

Language differences

Zach’s post on dialects prompts me to write about my own experiences. Coming from Ireland to the States has obviously involved coming to grips with differences in both written and spoken language, and has not always been easy.
As Zach discusses, it’s not that one form of language or the other is ‘better’ but that different dialects are appropriate in different social groups. When I first arrived in the United States there was much comment not just regarding my accent (“Say it again, say it again!”; “Say magically delicious!”) but on various phrasings and pieces of vocabulary. On occasion I had to repeat sentences, rephrasing them so that they would actually become intelligible to the person with whom I was speaking.
Gradually I got the hang of things. Paradoxically, however, it appeared that just as I became fluid in speaking “American English” the stress occasioned by the transition became most severe – with this becoming most apparent to me about 15 months after I arrived, when I went home for Christmas, and while able to revert, generally, to the local mode of speech, found it a constant strain, just as it was a strain when I later returned to Urbana.
At this stage, I think I’ve become more adept and relaxed at the transition. However, there are myriad differences to be tracked (and more of which I am probably not conscious):

• Americans use the word ‘that’ far less than Irish people
• Americans (I’m told this may be particularly prevalent in the Mid-West) drop pronouns – such as in “Would you like to come with?” instead of “Would you like to come with me?”. “Come with” and “go with” are the main cases, but I’ve encountered others.
• Americans drop prepositions – in particular in relation to the verb “to write” – “I will write you” instead of “I will write to you.” This one is perhaps the best known of the three ‘dropping’ situations I have observed.
• The Irish form of telling time – “half past three” or even “half three” to denote “3:30” – is utterly unknown in the United States. It’s amazing how often one has to talk about the half hour in day-to-day conversation.
• In the United States a ‘jumper’ is a cable, not a cable-knit sweater.
• There are also, of course, the standard trans-Atlantic humo(u)rous changes – in America a fanny is your ‘butt’, in Ireland or the UK it’s quite a different body part, rendering the term ‘fanny-pack’ unusable in Ireland; Americans use far fewer letters (“Is that a ‘u’ in that word? Why?”), and replace ‘s’ with ‘z’ whenever possible.